Commitments is my 42nd child – but every single child of mine is special to me. Their birthdays are cause for celebration, which is what I’m doing today. I’m celebrating the birth of Commitments as an eBook.

It’s about time! Commitments was first published in 1988 and has been issued in every other format but digital. Why? For one thing, because eBooks didn’t exist in 1988, when “electronic rights” weren’t even on publishers’ radar screens. For another, because more and more of you are reading electronically each year. And for a third, because my current publisher agreed that publishing Commitments digitally is long overdue.

I do. I admit it. I’m a hopeless romantic who, yes, does believe in love at first sight. I’m not saying it’s the only way love happens. But – skeptics be damned – I’ve known too many couples who were partners from the start. They felt an instant connection, and it wasn’t only physical, but emotional and intellectual as well.

If the attraction is only physical, that would be lust at first sight. I’ve known couples like that, too – couples who lay eyes on each other for the very first time and feel a powerful chemical attraction, if little else. In instances where chemical attraction evolves into emotion, love may follow. Otherwise, the prognosis is not good. If something happens to the physical – illness, accident, wanderlust – and there’s nothing else, what’s left?

If you’re reading this blog, you’re currently looking at the cover of my new book, BLUEPRINTS, which debuts this coming June. What do you think? Does the cover draw you in?

This isn’t an idle question. It’s one that my publisher and I have been asking ourselves since this cover became “the one.” We think it works. But then, we’ve already read the book. You all won’t have read it when you spot the book on sale next June. So will this cover lure you to buy?

Valentine’s Day is my kind of day. I was a romantic before I ever wrote a single romance, and once I did that – and discovered that people loved reading what I wrote – there was no end to my hearts-and-flowers imagination. All told, I wrote fifty romances, sometimes eight a year, I was that into it. But being a romance writer wasn’t, in fact, entirely hearts and flowers. There were friends who politely told me that they didn’t read “that kind of book.” Worse, there was the family member who actually told me she didn’t read “that kind of trash.” There were booksellers who hid me in a back corner when I came for a signing, rather than up front, where other visiting authors sat. And then there were people (male, usually, like the one selling me my first computer) who blithely said, “So now all you have to do is cut-and-paste different names, and you have a new book.”

And so comes the Monday after the first weekend you’ve all have with my newest book. I sit on tenterhooks wondering, worrying, hoping.

Sweet Salt Air has actually been out and around for the sake of getting early reviews. Part of the promotional campaign leading up to its publication entailed sending Advance Reading Copies to more than a hundred book groups around the country. In return, they’ve posted reviews in blogs and on Facebook, Goodreads, Amazon, and the like. Excerpts of some of these reviews appeared in a New York Times Book Review ad on Sunday, June 16. Here’s the ad. Pretty, huh?

Sandra Brown and I go way back. We started in the field of romance together, actually met at the first ever Romance Writers of America conference. We raised our kids, saw them marry and have their own kids at roughly the same time. Both straying from the romance genre, I entered the field of women’s fiction, while Sandra made her mark writing thrillers. Her novels are beautifully written, exquisitely plotted, and deeply sensual.

Low Pressure, her latest book, is no exception. I had the pleasure of hunkering down this weekend to read it, and while you know that I don’t do book reviews but simply tell you what I like, I gotta say I like this one. Where to begin?

Readers feel this. You’ve been engrossed in a book for however long it takes to read it and then, suddenly, the characters are gone. You write me asking what they’ll do now and whether they’ll ever be back. But if you miss them, think of what I’m feeling when I finish writing a book.

Take Sweet Salt Air. I’ve been living with Charlotte and Nicole and Leo and his dog Bear for a year and a half, so finishing the writing and having to let them go is bittersweet for me, too.

Surely by now you’ve heard friends talk of this book, and if you haven’t yet, you will. Consider me a friend. And here’s my talk.

I love the characters. Ana may be sexually naïve at the start of the book, but she has spunk and wit. She takes on Christian as no other woman has; the email between them is priceless. Christian is flawed, but for a reason. Discovering that reason is cause enough to read on.

I do try to blog several times a week, but it’s been ten days since my last post, and you loyal readers have Sweet Salt Air to blame. I’ve reached a critical point in the book – three hundred pages done, with the final climactic hundred ready to go. But … but … but …

Several sticking points. First, there’s a medical angle to this story, and though I’ve been working with a doctor in the Midwest since last summer, it’s suddenly showtime. That means re-reading everything he sent, making (another) list of questions for him, and, most importantly, firming up my timeline.

I’ve written sex scenes, oh have I written sex scenes. I’ve written twelve-page ones, six-page ones, one-page ones. I’ve also written two-paragraph sex scenes, and they’re just as special as the longest of the long. The reason? It’s all about the feeling behind the sex.